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Content Creation & Organizational Empowerment Key To Search Success

Nathan Safran on June 27, 2013 at 9:30 am

The SEO industry has undergone significant changes in the last 12+ months. Search has gained greater legitimacy as a marketing channel as budget holders increase head count and invest in advanced technology. And, the SERPs themselves have undergone changes that have had many implications, including adjustments to the underlying algorithms that surface content.

Here at Conductor, our Customer Success Team works closely with many of the world’s largest and most successful brands on their search efforts. They are therefore uniquely positioned to comment on the trends taking place in the world of SEO.

We surveyed the Customer Success Team to find out their perspective on the most important steps brands and agencies can take to drive long-term natural search success.

Content Creation & Organizational Empowerment Top Steps

First, we asked the Customer Success Team to choose the top three activities they think SEO professionals should focus on:

Based on your experience working with enterprise SEO customers, what would you say are the top three steps they should be taking to achieve long term natural search success? [Select top three]

Looking at the results, we see that the industry-wide shift toward quality content is reflected in the responses. According to the Customer Success Team, content creation should be the number one priority for SEOs.

In close second, behind content creation, is the empowerment of others in the organization to drive SEO. “The biggest impact I can make to my company’s natural search success is ensuring others are pulling in the same direction,” said an SEO Manager at a Global Fortune 500 to their Customer Success Manager.

This suggests that organizational empowerment creates an ecosystem in which others in the organization can drive natural search success to give SEO the best chance to grow and succeed.

Empowering SEO Organizations: Content Creation Using SEO Best Practices

Digging deeper into the ways in which SEOs are empowering others in their organization, we can see the top response was ‘enabling content creators to apply SEO best practices to content creation.’ Anecdotally, the Customer Success Team told us that the earlier in the content creation process SEO is involved, the greater the chance for far reaching success in SEO.

In fact, one SEO at a large brand commented, “The more success I have embedding SEO in the content creation process, the more it translates to results in the SERPs.”

Following this, the second most important way to empower others to drive SEO success was by ‘tying natural search metrics to business metrics’. “It’s critical that search metrics be translated to metrics the C-suite and other stakeholders speak”, said another SEO at a large online retailer.

Conclusion: Take Steps To Ensure Long-Term Success

SEO as an industry has experienced significant change in the last 12+ months. Today, a team of Customer Success Managers that help many of the world’s largest and most successful brands in natural search remind us how to achieve search success.

Brands, regardless of their size, will need to get SEO involved in content creation early on in the process and subsequently tie natural search metrics to business metrics if they want to achieve this long-term natural search success.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Nathan Safran

Nathan Safran is the CEO and founder of Blue Nile Research, a market research/thought leadership firm. Nathan helps firms of all sizes create industry leading research studies and thought leadership.